158 replies to this topic

[Tank]

Mister Blastman, on 21 July 2015 - 06:51 AM, said:

Hawken was just stupid, though. It was a giant missed opportunity. The gameplay was horrible.

You can say that again... We decided to try and first thing we got is inability to add a friend bug, on forums we red that in this case we had to contact the support. That's was ridicules, contacting support of almost dead game to be just able to play in group - the very key feature of any MMO, how do you fail at that?!

Sorry, game is not bad. But my frustration with this accident still runs with me up to this day. That was my first impression of Hawken.


Stomping, somehow those people able to play EVE in a decent numbers and thou that game is a spreadsheet simulator. From other side EVE developers wasn't scared for even more hardcore approach to gameplay - death, looting and more. Wish we had more approach for that crowd...

[Hex Pallett]

Anjian, on 21 July 2015 - 01:56 AM, said:

Moe, harems, Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, RPGs, fantasy themes, these for the most part have taken over. That has also shown in the weakening of the mech franchises over there.

Those are basically Call of Doody and Farmville equivalents in anime, which, in the realm of marketing has a particular name: low-engagement entertainment. CoD, Minecraft, Skyrim - same goes for all of them. That's where the money's at. Against most of us nerds here imagines, not all people - in fact, very few people - enjoy heavy, engaging entertainment because, well, they find reality more entertaining or something

Which is why a game like MWO can never have large commercial successes by today's standard. It's too hard.

[Hit the Deck]

Mister Blastman, on 21 July 2015 - 06:51 AM, said:

Hawken was just stupid, though. It was a giant missed opportunity. The gameplay was horrible.

But the art direction is oh so awesome! And the music is not bad.

[Iron Wolf]

The bar to enty is higher for a sim (greater complexity) and appeals to more of a niche market.

[Surn]

1. Clans - screwed up the Battletech storyline. 2. Battletech is 80s cold war future tech. It needs a revamp. 3. This game needs to have 3 levels of play: Strategic, tactical and casual/training.

Edited by MechregSurn, 22 July 2015 - 01:46 AM.

[Randall Flagg]

Market saturation with B-grade IP's that get released year after year with a new coat of paint? One of the main factors to is companies don't take risks like they used to. The 1990s were the golden age of computer gaming. I'm hoping we see a resurgence of mech games when virtual reality gets released.

[Lily from animove]

SKINLESS, on 22 July 2015 - 06:05 AM, said:

. I'm hoping we see a resurgence of mech games when virtual reality gets released.

Lol, when this happens, virtual boobs take over the world and modern mankind will extinct because no one ever leaves the house anymore.

http://edition.cnn.c...-ripley-pkg.cnn

or some other cltures take over the world, because they still breed like rabbits.

Edited by Lily from animove, 22 July 2015 - 08:03 AM.

[Anjian]

Helmstif, on 21 July 2015 - 07:31 AM, said:

Those are basically Call of Doody and Farmville equivalents in anime, which, in the realm of marketing has a particular name: low-engagement entertainment. CoD, Minecraft, Skyrim - same goes for all of them. That's where the money's at. Against most of us nerds here imagines, not all people - in fact, very few people - enjoy heavy, engaging entertainment because, well, they find reality more entertaining or something

Which is why a game like MWO can never have large commercial successes by today's standard. It's too hard.

I won't say low engagement. I would say series like Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Fairy Tail, and more, they have incredibly high rates of engagement with large dedicated global fanbases. Studying them is a study what makes franchises and series successful.

--- Engaging characters. Even the enemies are cool people.
--- Massive continuities
--- Detailed universes
--- Complex storylines

For a long time, anime is shaped by the Japanese toy industry (Bandai, Takara, etc,.) so they can create all sorts of toys. Robots makes good toys, if you happen to notice that, and they lend themselves to making all sorts of toy robots (Japan was big in the toy robot industry since the '50s which helped its economic recovery after the war), and an extension of that, the model kit industry. Thus there is a strong economic reason to sell toy robots which led to a long succession if not dominance of super robot anime. And to sell to the girls, there are all sorts of magic girl (mahoushojou) anime, e.g. Sailor Moon, the Precure series, that are all intended to sell gimmicky plastic toys (wands, rods, make up kits, tiaras) to young girls.

A major transformation happened in the anime industry which profoundly upped the quality of both art and narrative --- anime intended to promote manga and to some extent, video games. These are anime inspired from manga, but are really intended to help promote purchases of the manga. Japanese manga is very grassroots --- Komiket basically shows all sorts of self published amateur work that sells to a mega fanbase but the major publishers comb them to keep looking for new talent, and the manga industry is always hungry for new and more talent. The ecosystem in place in Japan continuously promotes grassroots talents which in turn, has led to massive creativity and content explosion. Helping to promote these manga, publishers turn to anime studios (or sometimes the other way around) to create anime from manga. And this created the very creative and diverse anime we have seen starting in the late 1990s.

Example of recent anime intended to promote manga and games.

These two have naval themes and are very popular right now.
Arpeggio of the Blue Steel -- Manga
Kancolle --- a browser game with collectibles.

[TheSilken]

I for one appreciate that mech games are not huge. It means that the majority of mech games are tailored for mech enthusiasts and not diluted for the masses. Not that I don't want more people to be a part of it but don't ***** out to make money. Basically I feel more appreciated and that the developers care more about their product as opposed to those that just pump out games to appeal to the most amount of people at a time. Quality > quantity.

[Stealth Fox]

SaltBeef, on 19 July 2015 - 06:48 PM, said:

Power Rangers and that was a Voltron rip- off.

Actually.. both series came from Japan.. Power Rangers is the same kind of show Voltron was, Sentai.

In which uniformed teams of heros fight monsters and villains in giant robots. Calling Power Rangers a rip off of Voltron is like calling any modern war movie a rip off of the old black and white classic war moves with The Duke or Mister Eastwood.

As a matter of fact, Power Rangers is a series that still goes on in japan and is often lovingly imported over to the U.S. with new monster costumes, sets and the like to make it match the story they wanna do instead of the Japanese variant.

Hate to burst your bubble fellow Devil Dog, but your facts where wrong.

This has been a hip pocket class in the origin of the Sentai, combining giant robot genre from Japan. ;p

[Lily from animove]

Anjian, on 22 July 2015 - 08:42 PM, said:

I won't say low engagement. I would say series like Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Fairy Tail, and more, they have incredibly high rates of engagement with large dedicated global fanbases. Studying them is a study what makes franchises and series successful.

--- Engaging characters. Even the enemies are cool people.
--- Massive continuities
--- Detailed universes
--- Complex storylines

For a long time, anime is shaped by the Japanese toy industry (Bandai, Takara, etc,.) so they can create all sorts of toys. Robots makes good toys, if you happen to notice that, and they lend themselves to making all sorts of toy robots (Japan was big in the toy robot industry since the '50s which helped its economic recovery after the war), and an extension of that, the model kit industry. Thus there is a strong economic reason to sell toy robots which led to a long succession if not dominance of super robot anime. And to sell to the girls, there are all sorts of magic girl (mahoushojou) anime, e.g. Sailor Moon, the Precure series, that are all intended to sell gimmicky plastic toys (wands, rods, make up kits, tiaras) to young girls.

A major transformation happened in the anime industry which profoundly upped the quality of both art and narrative --- anime intended to promote manga and to some extent, video games. These are anime inspired from manga, but are really intended to help promote purchases of the manga. Japanese manga is very grassroots --- Komiket basically shows all sorts of self published amateur work that sells to a mega fanbase but the major publishers comb them to keep looking for new talent, and the manga industry is always hungry for new and more talent. The ecosystem in place in Japan continuously promotes grassroots talents which in turn, has led to massive creativity and content explosion. Helping to promote these manga, publishers turn to anime studios (or sometimes the other way around) to create anime from manga. And this created the very creative and diverse anime we have seen starting in the late 1990s.

Example of recent anime intended to promote manga and games.

These two have naval themes and are very popular right now.
Arpeggio of the Blue Steel -- Manga
Kancolle --- a browser game with collectibles.

success =/= quality. COD, MC donalds, daily soaps and "reality docus" are very succesful things, but their quality is uttterly bad. Same for some animes. So it's matter of your goal, wanna make money? make mainstream ****. wanna make some quality products, calculate you will not be mainstream enough.

[CyclonerM]

Helmstif, on 21 July 2015 - 07:31 AM, said:

Those are basically Call of Doody and Farmville equivalents in anime, which, in the realm of marketing has a particular name: low-engagement entertainment. CoD, Minecraft, Skyrim - same goes for all of them. That's where the money's at. Against most of us nerds here imagines, not all people - in fact, very few people - enjoy heavy, engaging entertainment because, well, they find reality more entertaining or something

You think Skyrim is too easy? You are right, that is why mods exists

Btw, i am happy if MWO stays a niche game. I can wait longer times to get anything done by PGI, but i absolutely do not want to see this game become CoDdish to please the 12y.o. kids who might want to play this game for a month at best.

[Anjian]

Lily from animove, on 23 July 2015 - 01:01 AM, said:

success =/= quality. COD, MC donalds, daily soaps and "reality docus" are very succesful things, but their quality is uttterly bad. Same for some animes. So it's matter of your goal, wanna make money? make mainstream ****. wanna make some quality products, calculate you will not be mainstream enough.

And you think MWO is quality? Even compared to many popular games the quality of MWO is generally bad.

I don't confuse my hate towards FPS as well as the commonality of FPS games as marks of low quality. Quality is a completely isolated and separated issue from popularity. The CoD series for the most part, are very well executed and that is something I can't say about MWO.

Edited by Anjian, 23 July 2015 - 08:18 PM.

[Hex Pallett]

Anjian, on 22 July 2015 - 08:42 PM, said:

I won't say low engagement. I would say series like Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Fairy Tail, and more, they have incredibly high rates of engagement with large dedicated global fanbases. Studying them is a study what makes franchises and series successful.

--- Engaging characters. Even the enemies are cool people.
--- Massive continuities
--- Detailed universes
--- Complex storylines

Point taken. Though on the other hand, none of these *started off* as anything complex. Most of them IIRC had light-hearted openings, and the gradually the huge world was introduced. (I've been off anime/manga for a while now so I may be wrong)

Which, IMHO, is how introducing new franchises should be done. Take Dishonored for example: It's a new IP, it's a stealth game, which means - gameplay quality aside - it's not meant to be very popular. However it started off with an incredibly simple story: framed for a crime our protagonist did not commence, went on the death row, escaped and is out for vengeance. It's a premise everyone could understand, and until much later the game slowly unveiled that it's much more complex and has a whole lot to offer. And now Dishonored 2 is scheduled for spring 2016.

Coming back to why mech games aren't popular - let's be real, giant stompy robot is no longer in its prime, and using them as a selling point in itself is not enough. We need to start with a simpler premise, and make mechs a dynamic part of it. It's supposed to be the icing, not the cake itself.

[Anjian]

Helmstif, on 24 July 2015 - 07:21 AM, said:

Point taken. Though on the other hand, none of these *started off* as anything complex. Most of them IIRC had light-hearted openings, and the gradually the huge world was introduced. (I've been off anime/manga for a while now so I may be wrong)

Which, IMHO, is how introducing new franchises should be done. Take Dishonored for example: It's a new IP, it's a stealth game, which means - gameplay quality aside - it's not meant to be very popular. However it started off with an incredibly simple story: framed for a crime our protagonist did not commence, went on the death row, escaped and is out for vengeance. It's a premise everyone could understand, and until much later the game slowly unveiled that it's much more complex and has a whole lot to offer. And now Dishonored 2 is scheduled for spring 2016.

Coming back to why mech games aren't popular - let's be real, giant stompy robot is no longer in its prime, and using them as a selling point in itself is not enough. We need to start with a simpler premise, and make mechs a dynamic part of it. It's supposed to be the icing, not the cake itself.

Pretty much nailed it.

Popular anime and manga still starts off with something very simple, then gradually expands that to a massive and detailed universe (Naruto, Bleach, Dragon Ball, One Piece, Fairy Tail, etc,.)

It starts off with something as simple as a single sentence, which can motivate and fuel the franchise in its entirety .

Pokemon: Gotta catch'em all.
One Piece: I want to be the King of the Pirates!
Naruto; I am going to be Hokage!

Edited by Anjian, 24 July 2015 - 09:33 PM.

[Lily from animove]

Anjian, on 23 July 2015 - 08:15 PM, said:

And you think MWO is quality? Even compared to many popular games the quality of MWO is generally bad.

I don't confuse my hate towards FPS as well as the commonality of FPS games as marks of low quality. Quality is a completely isolated and separated issue from popularity. The CoD series for the most part, are very well executed and that is something I can't say about MWO.

Quality about the content an features, which is quite deep in MWO, and COD has no content, LOL its rebaked ****.
quality content over here?:




am not speaking of the quality of programming itself. because MWO has issues, and IGP prevented a lot quality form existing as well, which now with map reworks and such gets delivered better and better.

Dragon ball for example as a anime is hardly any quality. anything that came with DBZ and beyond is just weird random story glued to the universe with even more stronger bigger better more weird opponent. We could already detsory the planet, now we have the power to detsroy it 100000x times. While they keep every "popular" now nonsense character as a sidechar to appear randomly for no apparent reason. Only thing that evolved were like 5 people + their temporary opponent.
So aftr Dragonballs went mainstream it went downhill so much.

It's like those tripple ZZZ rebaked titles from EA, but easy consumers stuff becaue they can eat it the simple way.

And MWO could also go the easy success way but just screwing over anything thats battletech related and adding all the mainstream ****, which hopefully will not happen.

Edited by Lily from animove, 27 July 2015 - 08:48 AM.

[Anjian]

Dragonball actually has great characters, like those that turn from villain to heros like Piccolo and Vegeta. Furthermore, the story is so deep that it is generational, so that Gokou starts as a kid and ends up a grandfather. I honestly can't say that Battletech has great characters, it feels pretty much flat to me.

I don't know about "content" in MWO vs. CoD. The depth of content, mostly differing mechs, isn't fundamentally any different from all the different types of guns used in CoD (Type 95, FN-FAL, etc,.)

[Elizander]

At the base of all things Fantasy beats Scifi in terms of audience in general. More women play fantasy games and Scifi games are mostly males.

You were not told bedtime stories about giant war machines stomping through the land. You were told stories about fairies, knights and other fantasy stuff when you were a kid.

Edited by Elizander, 29 July 2015 - 05:11 AM.

[Anjian]

Nobody told stories about starships roaming the universe either, but you got Star Wars and Star Trek.

Scifi dominates summer movies. Comic book superheroes are a type of Scifi, not fantasy. So are alien invasions.

Scifi is more identified with spaceships than it is with giant robots. When you are dealing with interstellar empires, the core of that strength lies in starships, not giant robots. That's why giant robots never made sense in the interstellar setting (Japanese mecha anime are very very rarely, interstellar). Starships are also much more flexible in design, and they can be quite cool. Starships also make convenient vessels to base literature.

[Strum Wealh]

Elizander, on 29 July 2015 - 05:10 AM, said:

At the base of all things Fantasy beats Scifi in terms of audience in general. More women play fantasy games and Scifi games are mostly males.

You were not told bedtime stories about giant war machines stomping through the land. You were told stories about fairies, knights and other fantasy stuff when you were a kid.

Anjian, on 29 July 2015 - 05:34 AM, said:

Nobody told stories about starships roaming the universe either, but you got Star Wars and Star Trek.

Scifi dominates summer movies. Comic book superheroes are a type of Scifi, not fantasy. So are alien invasions.

Scifi is more identified with spaceships than it is with giant robots. When you are dealing with interstellar empires, the core of that strength lies in starships, not giant robots. That's why giant robots never made sense in the interstellar setting (Japanese mecha anime are very very rarely, interstellar). Starships are also much more flexible in design, and they can be quite cool. Starships also make convenient vessels to base literature.

If we want to be correct, all fiction is by definition fantasy.

Granted, what is called "high fantasy" (think Record of Lodoss War, LOTR, D&D, etc; contrast with "low fantasy", such as Dresden Files, True Blood, the World of Darkness games, etc) does tend to be more popular than most brands of science fiction - largely by virtue of the latter being a relatively new setting type, while the former is ancient by comparison (see: Arthurian legend).

It also depends on what sort of material one can access during those formative years; for example, I grew up on such works as Bubblegum Crisis (the original version), Appleseed, Guyver (the 1989 miniseries, the animated movie, and both live-action movies), Teknoman (the US localization of Tekkaman Blade), "the Golden Age of American(ized) Sentai" (MMPR, Beetleborgs, VR Troopers, Superhuman Samurai Cyber Squad, etc), the MetalTech games (EarthSeige & Battledrome), BattleTech & MechWarrior (of course ), and others - my foundation of the "knight-type character" is just as likely to be a woman as a man, is equipped with either full-body mechanical powered armor or living powered armor of alien origins, and/or strode the fields atop (or within) mechanical "steeds".